Five Steps to a Successful Web Presence

With all the information overload on web development and search engine technicalities, it can be easy to lose focus of the initial purpose of a website. A website is only as good as its performance - whether it is to build a community for social networking, to inform the public about pressing issues or to sell goods or services to a defined target audience, to advertise, to share, to network ...

Following is a list of five basic but crucial steps that are intented to serve as an outline when it comes to planning and creating any kind of web presence.

1. Arriving at the initial concept or idea. What type of business or organization will be represented? How and where is the information, business, product or service to be positioned (local target, market segment etc.)? What is the intended message? Who is the target audience? What is the desired response from that target audience? This initial conceptual phase is very important because it determines the design. In other words: Form follows function.
2. Graphic design, layout, color scheme, in many cases corporate identity design (otherwise known as logo design) to arrive at the overall look and feel of the website. At this stage web designers usually submit a first, so-called mock-up or design suggestion which may be just an image or a very simple web page to show some of the planned interactive and graphic elements such as logo animation, mouse-over effects etc.
3. Determining the website architecture: How is the content going to be structured and how are the various categories and subcategories going to be organized. Ideally a designer/developer will stay in touch with their clients during each step to ensure that both are on the same page regarding the desired outcome and to get the needed feedback.
4. Upon approval of the presented concept and mock-up(s), the designer/developer will move into the production phase which means creating the optimized web graphics and html documents, active server pages and rich media elements such as flash objects as needed. Building websites as so-called hybrid sites - meaning combining html and flash - is advisable because it will have all the visual interest and rich media capabilities while at the same time taking advantage of the search engine friendly html code. In other words, a hybrid site really offers the best of both worlds - which leads to the next step:
5. Natural or organic SEO or Search engine optimization. Once the site is fully produced and the client is happy with it, the site will go live - meaning it will be placed on a web server and will be accessible to the general public. It is important to make sure that people searching for what the website has to offer will actually find it. Necessary requirements are: Solid code that has been tested in several browsers, proper meta tags and titles, text navigation whenever possible, image alt tags, an xml based sitemap and a robots file, incoming and outgoing links, open directory and search engine submissions, google verification - among other things. The most important and powerful SEO tool however is to have a wealth of relevant and keyword rich content work for your site. This can be accomplished through regularly posting content updates on your own site, through blogging and through web video postings accompanied by its content in text format and deployed on multiple video streaming sites serving as rss aggregators. Other websites which function as rss readers will pick up the syndicated video and text content and re-publish it. Internet search engines will automatically "spider" and index content on the available sites for maximum exposure of your message.